On the stage of the Galleria degli Uffizi was held the Internationalcongress "The power of the Economics. The image of trade and merchants in the Hispanic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", organized by the group of research Siglo de Oro (GRISO) of the University of Navarra with the partnership of the Florentine museum. Some thirty specialists from nine countries and nineteen universities participated. During the days of the congress (9-10 February 2017) texts, theoretical approaches, literary caricatures, social dimensions and artistic representations of merchants and trade were discussed by the speakers at the conference room San Pier Scheraggio, the ancient church where Dante and Boccaccio once spoke. By the kind courtesy of the Uffizi, in the person of Eike Schmidt, its director, the congress participants were able to admire in a special visit some of the gallery's collections and other bibliographic gems preserved in the museum's Library Services , admirably explained by Dr. Claudio Di Benedetto, Coordinator of the Collection and Services Division.

GRISO was represented by its director, Professor Ignacio Arellano, and Dr. Jesús María Usunáriz, with other associate members such as Dr. Victoriano Roncero, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Also present were the directors of the teams that form part of the project "Authority and Power", Professors Edwin Williamson (Oxford), Christoph Strosetzki (Münster) and Pierre Civil (Sorbonne Nouvelle), together with other prestigious specialists.

The congress is part of the series of meetings of the line of research "Authority and power" and is part, specifically, of the project "Authority and power in the theater of the Golden Age. Estrategias, géneros, imágenes en la primera globalización" (FFI2014-52007-P) of the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain. It also joins the series of activities that GRISO has been organizing under the label of "Text and Image" in leading museums around the world, such as the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (Lisbon, Portugal), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), the Brukenthal National Museum (Sibiu, Romania) or the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Plastic Arts (Moscow, Russia), as well as the University of Navarra Museum (Pamplona, Spain), among others.